An A to Z of all things Breast Cancer
Look Good Feel Better
Charity: the only international cancer support charity that helps boost the physical and emotional wellbeing of people undergoing cancer treatment.
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The Look Good Feel Better confidence boosting workshops are held across the UK for women, men and young adults undergoing treatment for any type of cancer. Each group session is led by trained volunteers and is a chance to meet others is a similar situation, as well as learning useful skills and techniques to manage the side-effects of cancer treatment.
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They have also created lots of printed materials and online tutorials for those who are unable to attend one of their sessions, or who would like some extra advice
This is an absolutely brilliant charity. I went along for my session just after I’d had my first chemo. I’d had my hair cut short, but I still did have hair, eyebrows, eyelashes etc.
Ladies of all ages, shapes and sizes arrived. Many wearing head scarves, some with wigs (although it was hard to tell in many cases if they were wigs or real hair), but for some reason I inadvertently sat next to the only other lady in the room who had any hair.
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The first thing that happens is you get given a fairly awesome goody bag full of top-notch cosmetics. I have never been a designer girl and had no idea of the value of these items until my then 13-year old daughter pilfered half of them when I got home.
The next thing that happened in my session was that the ladies were invited to take off their wigs/head scarves if they wanted to, which most of them did. Had I attended this session a couple of months later when I had my own shiny Kojak head, I wouldn’t have batted an eye. But for some reason I was gob-smacked by being presented with this hairless wonder. It felt like that scene in the Disney film Witches, with Angelica Houston, when all the yummy mummies transform into hags.
I won’t lie, I found it a bit emotional as I knew that this would be me in a few weeks. But do you know what? About 5 minutes in everyone was chatting and no one cared about what everyone looked like. Everyone was talking about where they were in their treatment. I had lots of kind advice from ladies who were near the end of their treatment, and others who have already fought and won the battle but had now been diagnosed with secondary breast cancer.
As a middle-aged woman with 3 teenage children I found it heart breaking listening to the stories of the younger women who had yet to start their families. Some had had their eggs harvested so that they could possibly have children later. It’s just another horrible facet to this dreaded disease and harsh treatment of it.
And it wasn’t all doomy talk about The Cancer. There was lots of laughter (much of which was aimed at me and how shit I was at applying makeup!) Stories about families, kids, work. It was amazingly “normal” to be sat chatting to this group of amazing baldies!
I came away from the session smiling and positive. The volunteers who run this charity are amazing and really empathise with what cancer sufferers have to endure. There are so many medical procedures involved, it is great to be part of something that is just for fun. And while it won’t be true for everyone, for a lot of us we do feel ever so slightly better if we look good.
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Thoroughly recommend!!!